SiSoftware OpenCL Support Released

London, UK, 30th November 2009 - SiSoftware releases its suite of OpenCL GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics Processor Unit) benchmarks as part of SiSoftware Sandra 2010, the latest version of our award-winning utility, which includes remote analysis, benchmarking and diagnostic features for PCs, servers, and networks.

At SiSoftware we are constantly looking out for new technologies with the aim to understand how those technologies can best be benchmarked and analysed. We believe that the industry is seeing a shift from the model where heavy computational workload is processed on a traditional CPU to a model that uses the GPGPU or a combination of GPU and CPU; in a wide range of applications developers are using the power of GPGPU to aid business analysis, games, graphics and scientific applications.

As certain tasks or workloads may still perform better on traditional CPU, we see both CPU and GPGPU benchmarks to be an important part of performance analysis. Having launched the GPGPU Benchmarks with SiSoftware Sandra 2009 with support for AMD CTM/STREAM and nVidia CUDA, we have now ported the benchmark suite to OpenCL.

OpenCL is an open standard for running parallel tasks on GPUs, CPUs and hardware accelerators using the same code - unlike proprietary solutions. We believe OpenCL will become "the standard" for programming parallel workloads in the future, thus we have ported all our GPGPUs benchmarks to OpenCL.

Below is a quote we would like to share with you:

"AMD believes OpenCL is what the industry has been waiting for: an industry-standard, cross-platform development platform designed to allow developers to harness the immense computational power available in today’s GPUs and multi-core CPUs. We’ve been a staunch supporter of and contributor to OpenCL since its inception," said Patricia Harrell, director of Stream Computing, AMD. "SiSoftware has made significant contributions to the OpenCL ecosystem with the release of its GPGPU benchmark suite with OpenCL support. This benchmark suite enables customers, partners and OpenCL developers to easily measure application performance on heterogeneous platforms, and provides the information required to help optimize this performance."

The SiSoftware OpenCL Benchmarks look at the two major performance aspects:

Computational performance: in simple terms how fast it can crunch numbers. It follows the same style as the CPU Multi-Media benchmark using fractal generation as its workload. This allows the user to see the power of the GPGPU in solving a workload thus far exclusively performed on a CPU.

Memory performance: this analyses how fast data can be transferred to and from the GPGPU. No matter how fast the processing, ultimately the end result will be affected by memory performance.

SiSoftware, founded in 1995, is one of the leading providers of computer analysis, diagnostic and benchmarking software. The flagship product, known as "SANDRA", was launched in 1997 and has become one of the most widely used products in its field. Nearly 700 worldwide IT publications, magazines and review sites use SANDRA to analyse the performance of today's computers. Over 9,000 on-line reviews of computer hardware that use SANDRA are catalogued on our website alone.

Since launch, SiSoftware has always been at the forefront of the technology arena, being among the first providers of benchmarks that show the power of emerging new technologies such as multi-core, GPGPU, OpenCL, DirectCompute, x64, ARM, MIPS, NUMA, SMT (Hyper-Threading), SMP (multi-threading), AVX3, AVX2, AVX, FMA4, FMA, NEON, SSE4.2, SSE4.1, SSSE3, SSE3, SSE2, SSE, Java and .NET.